Vladimir Andreevich Tranzschel

Who was Vladimir Andreevich Tranzschel?

Vladimir Andreevich Tranzschel was a Russian botanist, mycologist and plant pathologist, especially an expert on rust fungi.

He graduated from Saint Petersburg University in 1889 and became an assistant at the Imperial Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg. 1898–1900, he was stationed at the University of Warsaw, but soon returned to Saint Petersburg and took a position a curator at the Botanic Garden of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. He remained affiliated with the Academy for the remainder of his career, from 1912 as senior botanist. He travelled and made collections in European Russia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Crimea, Kyrgyzstan, Pamir Mountains, Ussuri and Primorsky.

He is particularly known for Tranzschel's Law, that states that telia of microcyclic species of rust fungi that are descendants of macrocyclic, heteroecious rusts simulate aecia of the ancestral macrocyclic rust and occur on the aecial host of the latter. Tranzschel devised his law to assists in identification of the aecial host of a suspected heteroecious rust by looking for hosts attacked by a microcyclic rust with morphologically similar telia to the former. Modern evolutionary thinking about rust fungi and molecular investigations have confirmed its validity .